eicolab: design thinking for business innovation

Language and innovation

Does the subtleties and nuances, the richness and adaptability, of a language impact a culture’s (a population group’s) ability to innovate?

If the language:

  • is rich with borrowed words;
  • is open to playful metamorphosis by the majority of the population and not just the hyper- educated elite;
  • is actively used by many people in diverse (but not isolated) geographical regions so has to promote both variation and cross pollination);
  • has been in use for a significant time period and remain sufficiently unchanged so as to enable multigenerational access to history and stories;
  • has enough mechanisms to enable feed the brains of visual, aural and kinaesthetic thinkers…

Consider:
“There are about 540,000 words in the English language, about 5 times as many during shakespeare’s time.” From Shift Happens.

Does anyone have other stats for other languages?

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